A Good Marketing Plan Can Do Wonders for Your Ebay Store Business

First I must introduce myself as one of the founders of NetStoreSearch.com, a new online shopping directory which aims to help store owners at the various auction venue sites. But, self promotion aside, I want to discuss the importance of planning a marketing strategy to reap the best rewards from an eBay store.

When organizing a marketing plan for your store it is usually a good idea if you start form the very beginning. Be clear about what you are expecting from your business, who exactly your target audience is and the sales levels you need to achieve. Success in any business is about being able to reach out to your target audience, get and keep their attention and satisfy their demands or desires.

Most people lead a very busy and hectic life and have very little time to actually sit down and map out the perfect plan for their eBay store. This can work to your advantage if you do put the time aside to plan properly. But, whatever you do, I suggest to be really successful and earn real profits form your store venture you will eventually have to put together a good marketing strategy. So why not do it at the outset?

Probably the most crucial part of any eBay Store marketing plan is the advertising. You must understand that, particularly since eBay reduced the visibility of store inventory items in their search engine, it is mainly you, and the plan you adopt, that will attract your future customers.

Remember marketing covers almost every aspect of your business. The speed and reliability of the service you provide, the impression your email responses give, the quality of your packaging and the speed of your shipping will all impact on your bottom line eventually. But, for this article's purposes, let's concentrate on getting the customer to your store in the first place.

So what ideas can I suggest?

The most obvious tip to offer first is to use eBay as much as possible. Do not rush or skip over the setting up process of your store. The keywords you choose for the various pages, the use you make of your free content pages and your personal 'me' page are crucial. When Google eventually comes crawling, you want to be sure they take away a clear and positive set of drivers to target buyers to your store in future.

It is important to recognize that one of the key bits of information you can assume about your target customers is that they are reasonably competent PC users and, to be willing to shop online, confident and experienced Internet users. This knowledge can help you allocate resource, not least time and budget, in your marketing plans. There will be many ideas that come to mind, but you need to adopt those you can realistically take on within the resources you have available.

Understand that opening an eBay store is actually the same as launching your own website. You need to think of your store as a stand alone entity. You must explore everything and anything to drive customers your way. Many store sellers choose, and even rely on, listing inventory in the core listing formats, hoping that browsers in these more visible areas of eBay, will click over to their store. While this can indeed drive traffic your way, you can't rely on this method too much or the question begs why you ever opened a store in the first place? With that said, I've no doubt eBay would like you to use this method as the mainstay of your marketing!

Some of the most successful stores I know on eBay are run like professional ecommerce websites. They take full advantage of the help eBay gives with the fast and simple store construction and traffic referrals and capitalize on this as best they can. But, with the time saved, they then go outside of eBay to find their customers.

So what can you do outside of eBay to bring traffic to your store? The most obvious idea is to optimize your store to show up well in relevant searches done at Yahoo or Google.

What can improve your rankings with the two major search engines? Two things are crucial. First, your site is well organized, has clear and well thought out META information (e.g. the keywords you enter when setting up) and, secondly, try to get the search engines to come across your site address as often as possible elsewhere on the net. The more your site is found by the search engines elsewhere, the more your 'status' with many of them can improve.

Now eBay make it reasonably easy to get the first part of this organized. I certainly can't start guessing good keywords for your store but I can help you identify opportunities to get your eBay store link address out on to other websites to be found by search engine crawls.

First I recommend you spend an hour or two thinking as a customer of your store rather than the owner. Do some Google and Yahoo searches for the products you will be selling. Keep trying various phrases and words while searching. This alone will help you refine the keywords or phrases to use for your store setup, but it will also identify many, many websites that have content relevant to your store products.

If you see any established forums that show up prominently in your searches, consider joining and contributing. Even if you only use your eBay store URL as a signature (which is acceptable use in most forums), you can quickly place several links in the path of search engine crawls. If you see any directory type sites showing up in your searches take a look. Are they expensive to get included in? If a couple of bucks means your URL is listed, consider it. Again your store's address will be in the path of the search engine crawls and directory sites can be very search engine friendly because of the density of links they possess. If you aren't certain what I mean by a directory site, take a quick look at our website here.

Are there sites that, while relevant to your product range, wont be direct competitors? Will they consider placing a link on their site for your store? Advertising on smaller websites can be very affordable, a few dollars a month is not unusual. Not only is your name in the way of engine crawls, you may pick up a customer from that site's readership.

I've tried to avoid the obvious suggestions up until now. Yes, I presume we all know about Google Adwords by now. But the conversion rate from leads to sales can often ruin the margin for some eBay store types as the best keywords can become quite expensive per click. Don't let me put you off, they are an effective method of advertising, but do try small scale tests and properly analyze the results before committing major capital.

There are of course many offline methods of promoting your Store. Perhaps the most important will be any previous customer you have had and you can contact. Remember too, that once your store is operating, you need to build relationships and talk to your customers regularly and not simply rely on the eBay 'favorite seller' link.

Your new business could prove to be the liberator you've dreamed of. But in all too many cases it can also turn in to a weight around your neck dragging you down in to despair if sales volumes barely cover costs. Ask a business professional why so many businesses fail within the first couple of years and almost all will probably offer "bad management" as the answer. The warning is clear. Start as you mean to go on and manage your business effectively from the outset.

Finally, if I may be allowed a small liberty, if you can see some value in the paragraphs before, please click on over to NetStoreSearch.com for a minute or two. I'm confident you will see how easy and ludicrously cheap it can be to get your store 'out there' and, even if not for you, I'm confident a few minutes checking around the directory will inspire many new thoughts for your own store plans and help you analyze the competition!